


mother to us all

by thefudge



Category: Christian Bible, Christian Bible (New Testament)
Genre: Annunciation, F/M, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Temptation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-07 20:36:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20823425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefudge/pseuds/thefudge
Summary: Satan tempts Mary on the day that the Archangel Gabriel visits her.





	mother to us all

**Author's Note:**

> ....so, this has been lying in my drafts for a while (some of you might know i'm in the process of clearing out my drafts). I've always wanted to write something about Mary's temptation, and let's just say this is also me grappling with certain aspects of (my) faith. Just in case though, i'm gonna moderate the comments. Enjoy!

_They called me a vitch, burned me like saffron_   
_My matter is golden, a child of the odyssey_   
_My touch is righteous, like virus my Midas_   
_I'm golden_   
_He told me when I'm present I'm chosen_   
_So hold me tight, I swear, I'm golden_

There’s a particular, pungent dust at noon when the sun is too merciless for anyone to be out in the open. Juice drips from the muskmelons onto the cobblestones and the sellers in the market draw the wooden lattices over their stalls and lie down on their carpets to sleep. 

It smells like the end of the world. He was not allowed to _ see _the apocalypse, but he has sniffed it out. It smells just as lovely. 

His toes trace blackcurrants behind him on this sainted day. Only his robed figure stalks the alley path between the temples. No prayers rise into the sky. Everything is still.

He sees her then, the chosen girl. 

The carrier of divinity, if one could call it that. 

He lifts the veil from his mouth to better taste the air in which she runs. For she is running, her sandal strap worrying her ankle, as she dashes past the closed stalls, past the tanning courtyards, past the carts and mules, straight to the temple to ask Yahweh what this all means. She wants to run further than that too, wants to seek out Zechariah's wife and ask her about the child in the old woman's belly. She wants many things at once. 

Lucifer smiles. Old Gabriel must have given her the “good news”.

Poor child must be scared out of her wits. 

Oh, she must have carried herself well in front of the blazing angel, but the moment he was gone, she fled, heart in her teeth.

That is the problem with the sacrosanct, it can’t bring itself to heel, it can’t make itself knowable to mortals. Because if the sleeping flesh really knew the scope of God’s power, it would never enter this covenant. 

She would take a knife and carve out her own belly.

He would help her, of course. 

He can be merciful too.

Mary stops by the side of a broken well, leaning her body against it, watching her face in the dark water. She knows it is too brackish to drink. 

She is almost as dark as that water, olive-skinned, hair thick and not very soft to the touch, lips plump and sun-burned. Her tongue wets them for a moment.

Eve was much more beautiful, he thinks, which is only natural. Mary wears the curse of her age. She is already middle-aged even though she must not be past sixteen. The world is not kind to her, despite her lovely disposition. There is something impatient in the way she rearranges her veil, her small hands like fluttering birds, but not the kind of birds you could slip inside gilded cages. He likes this lively impatience, he likes that she ran, he likes that she can’t stop her heart beating. She must have been chosen because she is maidenly and pure-hearted, but there’s more to it than that. She was chosen because a girl like her could not birth people. Her own birth was a strangely inhuman, immaculate affair. No, there’s too much alchemic fire in her oven-belly, too much for a mortal to withstand. She would burn a man's seed. She must give half a god to the world. 

In a sense, she _ is _a little freak of nature, a witch out of time. 

Lucifer starts walking towards her.

He has seen the days ahead. She will face great retribution when her belly swells and no man claims the babe. They will try to stone her _ like _a witch and she will gladly take the pain because she knows nothing else.

He quickens his step. His shadow arrives before him, a dark snake at her feet. 

Mary looks up and a cool breeze touches her cheek. A cracked waterskin is offered to her, the mouth of it glistening in the sun.

The veiled man before her looks like a foreigner. His skin is the ashen-white of disease, delicate and plagued. Soon, patches of it will fall like leaves, but he was handsome once. His cool grey eyes remind her of the olives in winter. 

“You look like you need it,” he says simply in her tongue, but a little too articulate. As if he has taken pains to learn it. 

Mary smiles. He seems small and benighted. She hopes his death will be painless.

“Thank you.”

She takes the waterskin from him. It feels heavy in her hand. She raises it to her mouth. She is careful not to touch the lips to the skin. She must not want to catch the sickness. 

Still, she does not shy away from him. He watches her drink. She is thirsty, so she gulps heartily, noisily. Her tongue happily receives the bounty. 

When she is done, she gives it back to him and wipes her chin.

“For you,” she says, digging her hand into her robes and coming up with a fistful of dates. 

Lucifer looks down at her offering. He knows he can’t take it, but he’d like to. He’d like to eat them straight from her fingers. 

“Give it to a hungry child,” he says, mocking the Maker. 

Mary smiles again. “You are a good man.” 

Lucifer leans against the well. He chuckles.

“What if I told you that you drank poison which will kill the little god baking inside you?” 

He says each word carefully so that there is no confusion. 

The heat makes her throat close up.

Mary raises a hand to her eyes, as if he shines as bright as the angel.

“I - I would say you are lying.” 

Lucifer cocks his head to the side. “Am I? I suppose you will find out, one way or another.”

Mary lowers her eyes and wipes her mouth behind the veil. The fear and elation which had previously made her run to the temple seize her afresh, but there is an element of dark dread in them. 

“How - how do you know about that? Are you a messenger too?” 

Lucifer stares into the dark well. 

“I could be. Or maybe I’m him. Maybe I’m that little god, your son. You see, I’m dying. You killed me.” 

The string of words slips between her fingers. She doesn’t understand. But she doesn’t run. They never do. 

Women, in particular, have a secret chamber next to their hearts where the flicker of destruction beats a second tattoo. He should know, he put it there. 

“You’re not my son,” she says, trembling. “My son will live. He won’t be a god.” 

Lucifer looks up then.

“_ Won’t _ be a god?”

She swallows. “He - the angel told me he would be a man.” 

“The Son of God is no man.”

Mary stares at the wrinkled dates in her hand, wrinkled as her mother’s flesh. “The angel said he would be man first.”

“Then you misheard the message. And you don’t believe it anyway,” Lucifer says, picking at her thoughts. “You still hope, secretly, that the child will be yours and yours alone. But he will never belong to you. In fact, there will come a time when he casts you aside, for he will have need of your dying flesh no more.” 

Mary shakes her head. “You lie. We always need our mothers.”

“Some of us are motherless,” he says without feeling.

Mary stares at him, as if trying to find the mother in him.

She fails. 

“Not him. He’ll have me.” 

Lucifer smiles. “You will cling to him, that’s true. Follow him through the cities and deserts where he will gather devoted followers, more devoted than you. You will have to share him with them. All of them. And he will forget you. He won’t recognize the woman walking in his shadow.” 

Mary lets the dates fall from her hand. Her face crumbles.

He wonders if she will cry.

The young girl lifts her head up. “So this is to be my temptation. Lord help me withstand it. Take this evil from me.” 

Lucifer’s smile sours. 

No, she is not as lovely as Eve. 

“Oh, I’ve not started tempting you yet.” 

Mary frowns. “Yes, you -”

“If I was _ really _tempting you,” he drawls, “I’d do this.”

He folds her between thumb and forefinger.

She is a little seed. He breathes on her.

Mary opens her eyes. He’s got his arms around her. The sky is spinning, upside down. 

They are dancing, her feet struggling to keep up with him. 

What scares her is that there is nothing _ but _sky. Where has the earth gone?

He parts her hair, speaks into her ear. 

“Look down at your throat.”

She is wearing a gold necklace, so rare that it feels like a child’s breath on her skin. The pendant dangles between her breasts, a small round thing.

Little earth, dangling against her heart.

Mary picks it up gently in her palm. 

She laughs sweetly. It’s so impossibly lovely. She’s never had such a pretty thing to wear. 

Lucifer says, “Why be mother to one son when you can mother the earth between your breasts?” 

And then he grips her chin and pulls her mouth to his. “You can be Mother to us all.”

And he plants the image of fire behind her eyelids. A thousand glorious suns and sons.

“The sons you’d bear me would not be taken from you. They’d rule with you and me. They would honor you every day. As would I.” 

For he was not lying - he is motherless and craves a cradle. 

Mary raises her hands to his head. He is sick and dying and all the more beautiful for it. 

She whispers against his mouth, delicious lust for power in her throat, “they would not be sons of God.” 

She opens her eyes once more. They are standing by the well. 

The sun casts idle shadows against the walls.

No time has passed at all

The foreigner sizes her differently. There’s more cunning in his eyes. 

“Ah. I came too late, didn’t I? You’re already a mother.”

Mary touches her belly under the clothes and it feels warm. 

She feels relief and a certain strange regret that she no longer wears the earth for a pendant. 

But she knows she made the right choice. 

Lucifer smiles coolly. She is worse than Eve. Eve only craved to be equal to her beloved and to God. 

Mary of Nazareth hunts for greater things. 

He could show her her future sorrows, could show her punishment and death and despair, all her hopes gainsaid, but she has seen _ further _than him, to a future where God is taken in vain by the people of the world, but her son remains a figure of wonderful mystery, more untouchable than God, yet more familiar, more beloved, modern and eternal, able to reach the unfaithful, able to survive in a godless world. 

Lucifer can show her the cross, but she won’t see death. She will see future glory. 

And he can smell the end of the world on her lips. 

Yes, Jesus will be hers, in spite of it all. Son of God, but Man, her legacy, her glory too.

The truth of the matter is, Mary does not need the devil to tempt her.

God has already given her a crown. 

Lucifer bows a little. 

“May you have an easy time with it, sweet girl.”

She nods with a small, guilty smile. “Thank you.”

As he turns from her, he realizes with voluptuous self-hatred that he was the one tempted. 

Mary bends down and picks up the dates, brushes the dust from them. 

Her fingers work quick like sparrows. 

She slips one into her mouth. 

It tastes sweet. 


End file.
